S. Awan is a failed journalist, a student of history, a lover of music, film, culture, and an enthusiast of the the controversial and the weird.
Also a musician, and part-time freelance, involuntary human being. Also occasionally lives on the moon. Also is a ghost. And a cigarette butt that hasn't been put out properly; so, you know, there's still, like, smoke coming out of it and stuff...

In a 2015 article concerning this deployment of troops in France, I wrote of the thousands of armed soldiers that were about to be deployed into the streets as ‘a move that bears a striking resemblance to the beginnings of Martial Law in Europe…’

I also said in the same post that London would probably follow.

I actually don’t want to bother talking about the Parsons Green incident itself – but to explore a broader question about the response to it; and about the idea of armed soldiers being out in public to protect us from terror threats.

We can mostly skip the usual repetoire concerning the ‘terror incident or false flag?’ question (analysing footage, lack of CCTV, speculation on ‘crisis actors’, etc) and leave that to others.

A crude explosive device was apparently to blame for the tube incident in Parsons Green (though, from photos, it appears not to have damaged the bucket or container it was in), with around two dozen or so people reportedly injured and needing hospitalisation.

Quite possibly this IED was placed by a terrorist, ISIS sympathiser or lone wolf. And possibly it wasn’t. (more…)

When all the high-fives and cheering in the House of Commons were over and the bombs are dropping, I wondered if the mainstream media would decide to stop portraying this mammoth debate and vote as some kind of historic moment on a par with Churchill’s “we will fight them on the beaches”.

There was so much that bothered me about this whole Syria debate and the way it was covered that I almost don’t know where to begin.

OK, I apologise for the shamelessly attention-seeking headline. But not a day goes by without some attention-seeking newspaper headline or ‘story’ concerning Jeremy Corbyn.

Not since Princess Diana has a single individual in Britain taken up so much newspaper space on a daily basis (and it didn’t end well for her when she was assassinated by MI5 died in an accidental car crash in Paris).

I happened to notice that a week or so ago was the 10th anniversary of the death of the Labour MP and former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.

An apparently fit and healthy Mr Cook died in 2005 while walking on a remote Scottish mountainside, at the age of 59, and – according to the official statements – from a heart attack. Something tells me that the Chilcot Inquiry, whenever it eventually does emerge, will probably make no mention of Mr Cook’s death.

The recent news that British forces have been involved in (illegal) airstrikes in Syria may have come as a surprise to some; but of course there is a broader context to this story.

Far from the highly sanitised reporting of the mainstream media, it has in recent days emerged that American policy-makers have drawn up detailed plans for an imminent final invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Syria.

One of the moments I always remember most from Charles Dickens’ immortal seasonal story, A Christmas Carol, is the early passage where Ebeneezer Scrooge is visited by the charity collectors, who naively come to Scrooge for a donation to their ‘fund for the poor’.

True to character, the miserly Scrooge tells them that he doesn’t have time for ‘idle people’. “Are the work-houses still in operation?” he casually asks, implying that the poor, disabled and destitute should be put to work. When he is confronted with the possibility of many of them dying, Scrooge simply says, “well, they’d best get on with it and decrease the surplus population…”

The surprising death of former Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, this week from suspected alcohol-related illness reminds us of how few politicians of genuine character and integrity we have anymore in the UK.

“What just happened?” one devastated voter writes in a letter to The Independent, trying to come to terms with the 2015 General Election outcome. He concludes that was just happened was “Nothing short of an Establishment coup.”

That wouldn’t necessarily be an exaggeration. This is a very serious generational moment (of crisis) with major implications for society, for social cohesion, for common welfare and for the United Kingdom itself.

A forlorn Nick Clegg warned in his resignation speech on Friday morning, “The continued existence of our United Kingdom itself is now in grave jeopardy…”

We in the UK now have major problems ahead. In some respects the fear-mongering may be excessive; in others, however, there is genuine cause for great concern about what this 2015 General Election outcome will mean for UK society and what the next five years will hold.

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